re: Win98 and Hard Disc Partitions - more details
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 10:18 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Ed
(598 messages posted)
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was off having a hard think about this!
As you have more than one hard disk on your system, you may have "confused" the program
you installed Win98 with. It may not have expected to find anything other than a
single disk with a single partition on it - especially if it was older software dating
back to 1998.
And it's no good saying that manufacturers' CDs don't do weird partitioning tricks
of their own. I've seen it happen! I know it happens!!
FDISK is a program that uses odd rules to work out which drive letter to assign to
which partition. And it can give unexpected results if you use it on a disk that
has more than one partition on it. So the results you think you're getting don't
necessarily mean what you think they mean. Double check them!
FDISK is definitely not safe to use in a non-standard situation. It's a very crude
tool, and very user-unfriendly too. For diagnosis purposes, try reading the disk
with PARTITION MAGIC.
Don't make any changes to the disk until you've copied all the data off it. I suggest
GHOST as the surest and safest way to do this.
Ed
On Friday, October 19, 2007 at 10:50 am, Alan wrote:
>Hi Ed, and thanks for your reply.
>
>I failed to make everything absolutely clear, please accept my apologies!
>
>The first thing to note is that I have three physical drives on the PC - the C:
(5GB)
>drive is fine, and holds the OS (Win98). The other two drives were set up for data
>(D: drive - 40GB) and for programs (E: drive - 10GB).
>
>My problems have arisen since trying to install Win98SE on C: - an action which
seems
>to have made changes to D:.
>
>I'm aware of the "hidden" partitions used by Dell, etc. but there is no such partition
>on my C: drive, which I partitioned (making a single partition) and formatted when
>I first put Win98 on it (FDISK identifies this as PRI DOS and it is assigned logical
>drive letter C:). Similarly there were only single partitions on each of the other
>drives - until the failed Win98SE installation. The Win98SE disc was an OEM disc
>so it is quite possible that it started by partitioning the drive to put manufacturer-specific
>files there - but I don't understand why it wrote to my D: drive.
>
>As far as using Seagate diagnostics is concerned; I had the tools to hand, and they
>provide gneric tests as well as specific ones for Seagate drives and I have every
>confidence in the results they've given me; but of course if I can find any WD tools
>to do a similar test I shall use them. But I'm pretty certain now that my data
are
>intact, the problem lies with partitioning, so I just (just?) need to get the partitioning
>sorted out (!). Hence my question about the risks involved in using FDISK to delete
>a partition that I don't want and I don't believe contains anything that I need
to
>keep.
>
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